BBC Shakespeare Collection (1978-85 / 2020)•
Cedric Messina (1920-1993): Producer, series 1 & 2
Jonathan Miller (1934-2019): Producer, series 3 & 4
Shaun Sutton (1919-2004): Producer, series 5, 5 & 7The BBC Shakespeare Collection (1978-85)
[Laurence Olivier: Shakespeare Trilogy boxset purchased JB Hi-Fi, Albany (28/4/2026)]:
The BBC Television Shakespeare Collection, created by Cedric Messina – with John Thaw, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, John Cleese, Alan Rickman et al. – (UK, 1978-85). 38-DVD set.
The other day I bought a boxset of Laurence Olivier's three celebrated Shakespearean movies: Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955).
The first is credited with inspiring the British army as they invaded France - though its release in November 1944 meant that it "came too late in the Second World War to be a call to arms as such, but formed a powerful reminder of what Britain was defending." The second, subtitled by Olivier "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind," earned itself a rather equivocal review in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. And the third, according to the irrepressible John Lydon, gave him the inspiration for "Johnny Rotten", his stage persona as lead singer of the Sex Pistols.
Max Reinhardt & William Dieterle, dir. A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)l-to-r: Ross Alexander, Dick Powell, Jean Muir & Olivia de Havilland
Of course there'd been Shakespeare films before: Max Reinhardt's stylish A Midsummer Night's Dream may have been a bit of a flop at the time of its first release, but it's since come to be regarded as a classic, thanks in part to its sheer incandescent star power.
And then Kenneth Branagh seems to have taken it on himself to produce his own set of Shakespearean films, seemingly in direct competition with Olivier, in the 1980s and 90s. There's a gritty, revisionist Henry V (1989), a stupefyingly complete four-hour Hamlet (1996), and - instead of Olivier's Richard III - a very entertaining Much Ado About Nothing (1993).
Enjoyable though they are, I'd trade them all for the above lovably daft account of a Hamlet production manqué. The essence of the play comes across here much better than in his massive production number, released almost exactly a year later. And this ability to laugh at himself perhaps provides the one area in which he definitely surpasses the dazzling Olivier.
Somewhere in between Branagh and Olivier came the BBC TV Shakespeare. At their worst, the productions were stodgy and dull, but as time went by some of the more adventurous directors (and producers) dared to spread their wings, and a few of the later versions of the more obscure plays were - for me at least - breathtaking, groundbreaking, revelatory.
Pericles, in particular, woke me up to the true importance of the (so-called) "Late Romances" - those final plays that came after the great tragedies, and histories, and comedies, but combined elements of all of them in a strange, unprecedentedly fantastical manner.
Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest: only the second and the last are really familiar to most playgoers. Just locating a production of any of the others is pretty difficult - and there aren't any other screen versions available (at least so far as I'm aware).
But Pericles is beautiful - and surprising - and (albeit Shakespeare clearly wrote it in collaboration) deserves far more attention than it's received hitherto. I wrote a (bad) poem about it at the time, which you can (if you wish) read here.
Anyway. It's nice to have copies of all 37 of them at last. I haven't watched most of them since the 1980s, so it's bound to be a bit of a culture shock! But a very pleasant one, I hope.
Season 1 (1978-79):
- Romeo and Juliet
- King Richard the Second
- As You Like It
- Julius Caesar
- Measure for Measure
- King Henry the Eight
Season 2 (1979-80):- The First Part of King Henry the Fourth
- The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
- The Life of Henry the Fift
- Twelfth Night
- The Tempest
- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Season 3 (1980-81):- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Merchant of Venice
- All's Well That Ends Well
- The Winter's Tale
- Timon of Athens
- Antony and Cleopatra
Season 4 (1981-82):- Othello
- Troilus and Cressida
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
Season 5 (1982-83):- King Lear
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- The First Part of Henry the Sixt
- The Second Part of Henry the Sixt
- The Third Part of Henry the Sixt
- The Tragedy of Richard III
Season 6 (1983-84):- Cymbeline
- Macbeth
- The Comedy of Errors
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- The Tragedy of Coriolanus
Season 7 (1984-85):- The Life and Death of King John
- Pericles, Prince of Tyre
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Love's Labour's Lost
- Titus Andronicus
Season 1:
(Produced by Cedric Messina)
Cast:Clive James wrote of this production: "Verona seemed to have been built on very level ground, like the floor of a television studio. The fact that this artificiality was half accepted, half denied, told you that you were not in Verona at all, but in that semi-abstract, semi-concrete, wholly uninteresting city which is known to students as Messina."
- Patrick Ryecart as Romeo
- Rebecca Saire as Juliet
- Celia Johnson as Nurse
- Michael Hordern as Capulet
- John Gielgud as Chorus
- Anthony Andrews as Mercutio
- Alan Rickman as Tybalt
Rakoff opted for "high Renaissance Tuscany" as his setting, acknowledging that the ambience of such a location was "encrusted in tradition". His previous experience directing stylised productions, for example with backcloths rather than sets aiming for realism, led him to conclude that it's difficult to take the audience along for a character-based journey in that situation. The period also allowed for simpler, more youthful outfits for costume designer Odette Barrow than those in Elizabethan England. Barrow found inspiration from designs archived at the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Celia Johnson was cast against type, being known for playing "genteel" characters such as her most famous role in Brief Encounter. The sequence of the dance at the Capulets' party was shot in one take.
Rebecca Saire was only fourteen when the production was filmed, an unusually young age for an actress playing Juliet, although the character is just thirteen. In interviews with the press prior to the broadcast, Saire was critical of director Alvin Rakoff, stating that in his interpretation, Juliet is too childlike and asexual. This horrified the series' producers, who cancelled several scheduled interviews with the actress in the lead-up to broadcast. For his part, Rakoff admitted that Saire "does have limitations — which you're bound to have at that age — but at least she is fourteen."- Wikipedia: Romeo and Juliet
There's a certain truth to this gibe, I fear. When you compare it to other screen touchstones - Zeffirelli's classic version, for instance, with its notorious nude love scene; or even Baz Luhrumann's millennial revisioning of the play - this one seems distinctly stodgy and unexciting.
That's probably true of the whole series at this stage, unfortunately. It took a while to get past that initial styling by its first producer, a series of plays set in that "wholly uninteresting city ... known to students as Messina" - with a (union-enforced) all-British cast - before it began to forge its own approach to the challenge of a complete filmed Shakespeare.
The answer, as it turned out, was to let each play set its own agenda. Jonathan Miller could see that from the start. The fact that Cedric Messina couldn't is really not his fault. Getting the thing underway in the first place was such a monumental task that it's not surprising that he had to make many concessions to the top brass along the way. He simply didn't have the leeway subsequent producers did once it was clear that the whole enterprise was likely to prove a financial success.
Cast:
- Derek Jacobi as King Richard
- John Gielgud as John of Gaunt
- Jon Finch as Henry Bolingbroke
- Wendy Hiller as Duchess of York
- Charles Gray as Duke of York
Director David Giles shot the episode in such a way as to create a visual metaphor for Richard's position in relation to the court. Early in the production, he is constantly seen above the rest of the characters, especially at the top of stairs, but he always descends to the same level as everyone else, and often ends up below them. As the episode goes on, his positioning above characters becomes less and less frequent. An interpretative move by Giles which was especially well received by critics was his division of Richard's lengthy prison cell soliloquy up into several sections, which fade from one to another, suggesting a passage of time, and an ongoing slowly developing thought process. Giles saw the play as "unabashedly theatrical" and set out to give the outdoor scenes (filmed in a studio) a sense of symbolism and iconography, as with the garden sequence and the opening scene in the lists. Designer Tony Abbott's set consisted of large units that could be reoriented to create different perspectives and designs, "like an enormous Lego set", to give the overall impression of Gothic architecture.
For the costumes, Giles set out to make clothes that looked as much as possible like things the characters wore every day, rather that something out of a book of hours. He noted that people in the Middle Ages did not wear clothes as a form of self-expression. While Richard and his court wear colours, Bolingbroke remains in black and silver armour until he becomes King, and then is dressed more colourfully. John Gielgud, who played John of Gaunt, had directed the play multiple times. Jon Finch, having little experience performing Shakespeare on the stage, was nervous about the role until Gielgud praised his verse at the table reading; Finch had more confidence after this. Giles and Jacobi agreed early on that Richard was guilty of the murder of Woodstock which precedes the play. Giles said that they agreed on Richard's emotion in the first scene as being "high tension because it's the moment he's been waiting for so long".- Wikipedia: King Richard the Second
To be honest, I couldn't really make head or tail of Ben Whishaw's performance as Richard in The Hollow Crown. He seemed to spend the first half of the production wandering around the countryside in an aimless way, so it didn't seem surprising that Bolingbroke was so easily able to dethrone him when he finally turned up.
Derek Jacobi's take on the part is, by contrast, focussed and to the point - insofar as one can say that of so dreamy and ineffectual a king. This is clearly the play as it's come down to us: lachrymose and hysterical at times, but with a certain strange dignity at others. It's a good start to the BBC version of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of English history plays - first chronologically, second in order of composition.
Cast:Kenneth Branagh decided to set his own version of As You Like It in Japan. It's a bit hard to see why. It adds nothing discernible thematically, except for the chance to use some rather fetching samurai outfits.
- Helen Mirren as Rosalind
- Brian Stirner as Orlando
- Richard Pasco as Jaques
- Angharad Rees as Celia
- James Bolam as Touchstone
- Clive Francis as Oliver
The production was shot at Glamis Castle in Scotland, one of only two productions shot on location, with the other being The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight. The location shooting received a lukewarm response from both critics and the BBC's own people, however, with the general consensus being that the natural world in the episode overwhelmed the actors and the story. Director Basil Coleman initially felt that the play should be filmed over the course of a year, with the change in seasons from winter to summer marking the ideological change in the characters, but he was forced to shoot entirely in May, even though the play begins in winter. This, in turn, meant the harshness of the forest described in the text was replaced by lush greenery, which was distinctly unthreatening, with the characters' "time in the forest appear[ing] to be more an upscale camping expedition rather than exile." A shepherd's cottage, built for the production, had to be rebuilt after cows ate the first one.- Wikipedia: As You Like It
His two leads, Romola Garai as Rosalind and Bryce Dallas Howard as Celia, behave suitably strangely, and for the most part the play runs its expected, rather daft course.
But Helen Mirren was probably better than either of them in the BBC production, which also has the advantage of being set in a more credible Forest of Arden than Branagh's. Leaving to one side the quesiton of whether it should actually taking place in the English "Arden" or the French "Ardennes", it's a play which either delights you or it doesn't.
Again, you either get the point of "melancholy Jaques" and his long asides or you don't. He's either an irrelevant stiff or the moving spirit of the play. That, too, has a lot to do with who's performing the part.
Cast:This was not really one of the success stories of the series. Julius Caesar looks more like Tiberius than the "bald whore-monger" Julius Caesar. And the air of intrigue and dark deeds that should surround the opening is largely ost in translation.
- Richard Pasco as Marcus Brutus
- Charles Gray as Julius Caesar
- Keith Michell as Marcus Antonius
- David Collings as Cassius
- Virginia McKenna as Portia
- Elizabeth Spriggs as Calphurnia
Director Herbert Wise felt that Julius Caesar should be set in the Elizabethan era, but as per the emphasis on realism, he instead set it in a Roman milieu. Wise argued that the play "is not really a Roman play. It's an Elizabethan play and it's a view of Rome from an Elizabethan standpoint." Regarding setting the play in Shakespeare's day, Wise stated that, "I don't think that's right for the audience we will be getting. It's not a jaded theatre audience seeing the play for the umpteenth time: for them that would be an interesting approach and might throw new light on the play. But for an audience many of whom won't have seen the play before, I believe it would only be confusing." Nevertheless, Wise estimated that only ten lines had been cut.
Costume designer Odette Barrow sourced material for new togas and tunics but also re-used some from the BBC's earlier production of I, Claudius, although had to remove decorations as this was an aesthetically simpler period in Rome's history. Late in the pre-production period, Barrow discovered research showing that the Roman military uniforms used for previous productions were not entirely accurate, and the designs had to be hastily fixed. Designer Tony Abbott created columns with different designs on each side and a set that could be switched around throughout production to create new locations. Keith Michell, playing Mark Antony, had played Antony in the BBC's biggest previous production of the Roman tales, fifteen years earlier, The Spread of the Eagle.- Wikipedia: Julius Caesar
Admittedly, it does have strong competition. It's not that Brando was particularly good as Mark Antony, but he was ... Brando. There was an air of class and intensity about the 1953 movie which makes it still very watchable now.
There's also a 1970 version with Charlton Heston as Mark Antony and John Gielgud as Caesar. I haven't seen it, so I can't really comment, but some have claimed it to be superior to the earlier version. Heston certainly seems to have enjoyed acting in it. He writes quite a lot about it in his book The Actor's Life.
Cast:Measure for Measure is a horribly difficult play to bring off for a contemporary audience. There's just so much that's wrong about it for a modern sensibility. Marrying off the ghastly Angelo to poor Mariana at the end hardly seems like much of a solution to the moral dilemmas brought up by the action - but at least it inspired one of Tennyson's most popular poems.
- Kenneth Colley as Duke
- Kate Nelligan as Isabella
- Tim Pigott-Smith as Angelo
- Christopher Strauli as Claudio
- John McEnery as Lucio
- Jacqueline Pearce as Mariana
- Frank Middlemass as Pompey
- Alun Armstrong as Provost
- Adrienne Corri as Mistress Overdone
The role of the Duke was originally offered to Alec Guinness. After he turned it down, the role was offered to a further thirty-one actors before Kenneth Colley accepted the part.
Director Desmond Davis based the brothel in the play on a traditional Western saloon and the prison on a typical horror film dungeon. The set for the episode was a 360-degree set backed by a cyclorama, which allowed actors to move from location to location without cutting – actors could walk through the streets of Vienna by circumnavigating the studio eight times. For the interview scenes, Davis decided to link them aesthetically and shot both in the same manner; Angelo was shot upwards from waist level to make him look large, Isabella was shot from further away so more background was visible in her shots, making her appear smaller. Gradually, the shots then move towards each other's style so that, by the end of the scene, they are both shot in the same framing. There was minimal cutting of dialogue, with script editor Alan Shallcross focusing on removing the material that is designed to build the intensity around the Duke's return to Vienna, which he felt added minor characters and situations that were unnecessary for the viewer.
Shallcross wrote additional Elizabethan dialogue for the background characters in crowd scenes, such as the sequence where Mistress Overdone is arrested, since the actors could not improvise as they would in a modern production. Costume designer Odette Barrow based her costumes on Italian fashions of the time as the Viennese fashions used stiff fabrics and styles that would have been difficult for the actors to work with. The brothel and the convent were the same set, just painted different colours, which amused Davis due to its sense of duality between the two places.- Wikipedia: Measure for Measure
Bob Komar's 2006 movie shifts the action to the present-day British army. It received mixed reviews. It was felt by some that the subtraction of most of the subplots had the effect of undermining rather than focussing the main theme of the seduction and hypocrisy of power.
Cast:While this is, for us, definitely a twice-told tale, it's worth remembering how exciting it must have been to see these events reenacted for Shakespeare's original audience. It was, in effect, the Edward and Mrs. Simpson of its day.
- Tony Church as Prologue
- John Stride as Henry VIII
- Julian Glover as Duke of Buckingham
- Jeremy Kemp as Duke of Norfolk
- David Rintoul as Lord Abergavenny
- Timothy West as Cardinal Wolsey
- John Rowe as Cromwell
- Claire Bloom as Katharine of Aragon
- Barbara Kellerman as Anne Bullen
The second of only two episodes shot on location, after As You Like It. Whereas the location shooting in that episode was heavily criticised as taking away from the play, here, the location work was celebrated. The episode was shot at Leeds Castle, Penshurst Place and Hever Castle, in the actual rooms in which some of the real events took place. Director Kevin Billington felt that location shooting was essential to the production; "I wanted to get away from the idea that this is some kind of fancy pageant. I wanted to feel the reality. I wanted great stone walls [...] We shot at Hever Castle, where Anne Bullen lived; at Penhurst, which was Buckingham's place; and at Leeds Castle, where Henry was with Anne Bullen." Wilders fought to retain the porter scene (Act 5, scene 4) as the only scene in the play where the common people are represented. But Billington believed that, aside from introducing new, minor characters, the play's main purpose on stage was to allow costume changes for others, and it wasn't needed in the television format. Costume designer Alun Hughes utilised Tudor paintings as sources for his costumes.
Shooting on location had several benefits; the camera could be set up in such a way as to show ceilings, which cannot be done when shooting in a TV studio, as rooms are ceiling-less to facilitate lighting. The episode was shot in winter, and on occasions, characters' breath can be seen, which was also impossible to achieve in studio. The weather was so cold that, for Buckingham's death scene upon a lake, the production team had to break the ice first before they could launch the boat. Ultimately, because of the cost, logistics and planning required for shooting on location, Messina decided that all subsequent productions would be done in-studio, a decision which did not go down well with several of the directors lined up for work on the second season.
Claire Bloom is good as Katharine of Aragon, and has little difficulty in dispelling the shadows of The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. Since then, of course, the Tudor story has been rehashed again and again, from the viewpoint of this, that, or the other character.
It seems likely that this is one of the last of Shakespeare's plays before he retired to Stratford. It literally brought down the house at the Globe Theatre, as "sparks from an on-stage cannon landed on a thatched roof" and set fire to the building during the first performance on 29 June 1613.
Season 2:
(Produced by Cedric Messina)
•
David Giles, dir.: The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (1979)
The First Part of King Henry the Fourth,
with the life and death of Henry surnamed Hotspur
Directed by David Giles
(1979)
with the life and death of Henry surnamed Hotspur
Directed by David Giles
(1979)
Cast:Overall, I thought that David Gwillim did a good job as Prince Hal. Leaving to one side that I find him a pretty hateful character at all stages of his development - but particularly after he 'reforms' and becomes the violent warlord of Henry V - I thought Gwillim humanised him as much as is possible within the confines of the role.
- Jon Finch as King Henry the Fourth
- David Gwillim as Henry, Prince of Wales
- Tim Pigott-Smith as Henry 'Hotspur' Percy
- Richard Owens as Owen Glendower
- Anthony Quayle as Sir John Falstaff
- Brenda Bruce as Mistress Quickly
The week prior to the screening of this episode in both the UK and the US, the first-season episode King Richard the Second was repeated as a lead-in to the trilogy. The episode also began with Richard's death scene from the previous play.
Anthony Quayle returned to the role of Falstaff almost thirty years after first playing him at the Festival of Britain. His performance was more humanised in this later version. Falstaff, as the character who exists on a more meta-theatrical level, is the only character to speak directly to camera. Giles used a narrow lens during battle scenes, both to keep the combatants clear in the front of the frame and to reduce the depth of field, so the limited studio sets were blurred in the background. Tim-Pigott Smith noted that the fight choreography was specifically targeted at rejecting any notion of nobility in the battles, both large and small.
Cedric Messina saw the Henriad as a "sort of Curse of the House of Atreus in English". In considering character motivation, Giles learned that Prince Hal had been given, by his father, as a hostage to Richard II during the latter's trip to Ireland, to ensure his father's loyalty. Richard treated Hal very well, and Giles wondered if this was one reason for Hal's reaction against his father before and during this play.- Wikipedia: The First Part of King Henry the Fourth
As for the others, Jon Finch was an icy cold and distant king. One could see why Hal might prefer the loose life of the tavern to his forbidding court.
Of course any production of these plays depends on how you rate their Falstaff. Quayle was, I thought, brilliant in the part. I still remember his version of the "honour" speech, and how convincingly he followed the line of reasoning which muted his martial ardour.
As long as there's a British theatre, there'll be productions of these plays. Too many people want to play Falstaff and Hal for them ever to drop out of the repertoire. The Hollow Crown paired up Simon Russell Beale with Tom Hiddleston, which is quite a lot of star power to commit to a TV production. The former won a BAFTA for his performance.
•
David Giles, dir.: The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth (1979)
The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth containing his Death:
and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift
Directed by David Giles
(1979)
and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift
Directed by David Giles
(1979)
Cast:
- Jon Finch as King Henry the Fourth
- David Gwillim as Henry, Prince of Wales
- Anthony Quayle as Sir John Falstaff
- Jack Galloway as Poins
- Gordon Gostelow as Bardolph
- Bryan Pringle as Pistol
- Robert Eddison as Justice Robert Shallow
- Brenda Bruce as Hostess Quickly
- Frances Cuka as Doll Tearsheet
This episode starts with a reprise of the death of Richard, followed by an excerpt from the first-season episode King Richard the Second. Rumour's opening soliloquy is then heard in voice-over, played over scenes from the previous week's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth; Henry's lamentation that he has not been able to visit the Holy Land, and the death of Hotspur at the hands of Prince Hal. With over a quarter of the lines from the Folio text cut, this production had more material omitted than any other in the entire series. Scholars suspect that Shakespeare didn't know precisely what illness King Henry developed. Medieval texts, such as the Brut Chronicle suggest it was a combination of leprosy and syphilis, which was reflected in the make-up for the character as he becomes more unwell. However modern scholars generally dismiss the idea that the King suffered from leprosy. Giles used a higher number of reverse-angle, over-the-shoulder shots than in Richard II, creating a more tense atmosphere than was usually achieved under Messina's "house style".
- Wikipedia: The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
I suppose, really, it all comes down to that brutal scene where Hal repudiates his former friend: "I know thee not, old man." All the time the disgraceful Falstaff thought he was acting as a mentor, he was in fact simply a figure of fun. Although the rebuke is justified, it's the hypocrisy of it that really stings. Hal makes it clear what kind of king he's going to be: a brutal, pitiless bully.
Cast:
- Alec McCowen as Chorus
- David Gwillim as King Henry the Fifth
- Brian Poyser as Gower
- Tim Wylton as Fluellen
- Paddy Ward as MacMorris
- Julian Glover as The Constable of France
- Jocelyne Boisseau as Katherine, Daughter to Charles and Isabel
Director David Giles and production designer Don Homfray both felt this episode should look different from the two Henry IV plays. While they had been focused on rooms and domestic interiors, Henry V was focused on large open spaces. As such, because they could not shoot on location, and because creating realistic reproductions of such spaces in a studio was not possible, they decided on a more stylised approach to production design than had hitherto been seen in the series. Ironically, the finished product looked more realistic than either of them had anticipated or desired. Giles felt that the play was the least naturalistic of the tetralogy, in part because of the role of the Chorus, and in part because King Henry is a role-player. The stylisation was especially pronounced in the scenes of the French court, with both nonrepresentational sets and a larger style of acting. Costume designer Odette Barrow received heraldry advice from Charles Kightly from the Royal College of Arms, an authority on the Battle of Agincourt. As this production was designed to be the conclusion of a trilogy, describing the growth of Henry from prince to king, rather than a standalone drama, Messina was happy for cuts to be made which lessened the ambiguity of Henry's goodness. Messina said, "The speech he makes threatening the people of Harfleur is absolutely awful."
- Wikipedia: The Life of Henry the Fift
It's a curious play. Generations have seen it as a stirring piece of patriotic uplift: the pointless invasion of France to uphold his "rights" being just the sort of thing to make the heart stir. Certainly Olivier saw nothing incongruous in playing it that way, under the circumstances.
Branagh's Henry is a more equivocal figure. He tries to humanise him in the courtship scenes, but the battlefield action is only too grittily realistic at times.
Agincourt is generally played as a kind of triumph: and it was indeed a striking vindication of the young king's tactics and the sheer power of the longdow. But the whole campaign was a rather pointless exercise overall - a show of strength which, in the long run, did more to revive French patriotism than to vindicate English dynastic ambitions in France.
Modern productions struggle to balance these two opposing readings. The BBC version of the play steers a rather awkward middle course.
Cast:
- Alec McCowen as Malvolio
- Robert Hardy as Sir Toby Belch
- Felicity Kendal as Viola
- Sinéad Cusack as Olivia
- Trevor Peacock as Feste
- Ronnie Stevens as Sir Andrew Aguecheek
Director John Gorrie interpreted Twelfth Night as an English country house comedy, and incorporated influences ranging from Luigi Pirandello's play Il Gioco delle Parti to ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs. Gorrie also set the play during the English Civil War in the hopes the use of cavaliers and roundheads would help focus the dramatisation of the conflict between festivity and Puritanism. Gorrie wanted the episode to be as realistic as possible, and in designing Olivia's house, made sure that the geography of the building was practical. He then shot the episode in such a way that the audience becomes aware of the logical geography, often shooting characters entering and exiting doorways into rooms and corridors.
- Wikipedia: Twelfth Night
I'm afraid that Trevor Nunn's very amusing version of the play has rather eclipsed the valiant attempts of the BBC production to jazz up their rather ponderous setting. Imogen Stubbs was particularly good as Viola, I thought - though, once again, Felicity Kendall did her best.
An amusing sidelight is thrown on the play by the 2006 Amanda Bynes comedy She's the Man. Presumably the idea was to try and repeat the success of Clueless (1995) in providing a modern mirror version of a literary classic - in that case, Jane Austen's Emma. The movie made money, but was not otherwise very successful with the critics.
The concensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads: "Shakespeare's wit gets lost in translation with She's the Man's broad slapstick, predictable jokes, and unconvincing plotline." ... However, Roger Ebert claimed that "Of Amanda Bynes let us say that she is sunny and plucky and somehow finds a way to play her impossible role without clearing her throat more than six or eight times. More importantly, we like her." So I guess that's something.
Cast:
- Michael Hordern as Prospero
- Warren Clarke as Caliban
- David Dixon as Ariel
- Pippa Guard as Miranda
- Christopher Guard as Ferdinand
The episode used a 360-degree set, which allowed actors to move from the beach to the cliff to the orchard without edits. The orchard was composed of real apple trees. The visual effects seen in this episode were not developed for use here. They had been developed for Top of the Pops and Doctor Who. John Gielgud was originally cast as Prospero, but contractual conflicts delayed the production, and by the time Messina had sorted them out, Gielgud was unavailable.
- Wikipedia: The Tempest
...
Cast:
- Derek Jacobi as Hamlet
- Claire Bloom as Gertrude
- Patrick Stewart as Claudius
- Eric Porter as Polonius
- Lalla Ward as Ophelia
- Patrick Allen as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
- Robert Swann as Horatio
Originally, director Rodney Bennett had wanted to shoot the production on location, but after the first season, it was decreed that all productions were to be studio-based. Bennett made a virtue of this restriction and his Hamlet, Prince of Denmark "was the first fully stylized production of the series." Bennett himself argued that "though on the face of it, Hamlet would seem to be a great naturalistic play, it isn't really [...] It has reality but it is essentially a theatrical reality. The way to do it is to start with nothing and gradually feed in only what's actually required." As such, the production design was open, with ambiguous space, openings without architectural specificity and emptiness. Susan Willis argues of this episode that it "was the first to affirm a theatre-based style rather than aspiring half-heartedly to the nature of film."
Derek Jacobi commenced this production immediately after a lengthy run on stage in Toby Robertson's production, first at The Old Vic and then on international tour for two years. Jacobi attempted to come at the production with a fresh mind. For example on stage Jacobi's Hamlet had expressed anger when the players perform the dumb show before The Mousetrap, fearing it will ruin his plan to catch Claudius. Here, Bennett believed Hamlet would know what the play contained, so Jacobi altered his performance to show he was expecting a reaction in the dumb show and, when Claudius didn't react, Hamlet began to suspect the ghost had been lying. Jacobi wanted to deliver the 'To be or not to be' speech as a direct address to Ophelia, perhaps even a flirtation, but Bennett rejected this approach.
The production was taped in Studio 1 at BBC Television Centre, at 995m2 the second largest TV studio in Britain at the time. Designer Don Homfray used ramps around the circumference of the playing space for the camera, allowing him to give a sense of distance by capturing the floor in the far background. By looking down, it also helped hide the lights above. Just as Hamlet is never sure of what is real, Bennett wanted to keep the architecture vague so things played out in an uncertain space. The walls were insubstantial, with "Rembrandt-inspired" lighting, to create a sense of a world where there is always the chance of being watched or overheard. The only three-dimensional space with solid walls would be, ironically, the stage for the players, which was designed to feel like an Italian renaissance theatre. Bennett and his costume designer, Barbara Kronig, gave things a mid-sixteenth century feel, taking inspiration from Durer and Breughel, to convey the sense of Hamlet being a traditional story that preceded Shakespeare. Kronig used dark greens and blues, so Homfray offset this with greys and steel shades.- Wikipedia: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
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Season 3:
(Produced by Jonathan Miller)
Cast:...
- Sarah Badel as Katherine
- Susan Penhaligon as Bianca
- John Cleese as Petruchio
The production was at least partially based on Miller's own 1972 Chichester Festival stage production starring Joan Plowright and Anthony Hopkins, and as with all of the episodes Jonathan Miller directed, he allowed the work of celebrated artisans to influence his design concepts. In the case of Shrew, the street set was based on the work of architect Sebastiano Serlio, as well as the Teatro Olimpico, designed by Andrea Palladio. Baptista's living room was modelled closely on Vermeer's The Music Lesson.
The casting of John Cleese as Petruchio was not without controversy. Cleese had never performed Shakespeare before, and was not a fan of the first two seasons of the BBC Television Shakespeare. As such, he took some persuading from Miller that the BBC Shrew would not be, as Cleese feared "about a lot of furniture being knocked over, a lot of wine being spilled, a lot of thighs being slapped and a lot of unmotivated laughter." Miller told Cleese that the episode would interpret Petruchio as an early Puritan more concerned with attempting to show Kate how preposterous her behaviour is ("showing her an image of herself" as Miller put it), rather than bullying her into submission, and as such, the part was not to be acted along the traditional lines of the swaggering braggart a la Richard Burton in Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film adaptation. According to Cleese, who consulted a psychiatrist who specialised in treating "shrews," "Petruchio doesn't believe in his own antics, but in the craftiest and most sophisticated way he needs to show Kate certain things about her behaviour. He takes one look at her and realises that here is the woman for him, but he has to go through the process of 'reconditioning' her before anything else. So he behaves just as outrageously as she does in order to make her aware of the effect that her behaviour has on other people [...] Kate needs to be made happy – she is quite clearly unhappy at the beginning of the play, and then extremely happy at the end because of what she has achieved with Petruchio's help." Miller also researched how troublesome children were treated at the Tavistock Clinic, where imitation was often used during therapy; "there are ways in which a skilful therapist will gently mock a child out of a tantrum by giving an amusing imitation of the tantrum immediately after its happened. The child then has a mirror held up to it and is capable of seeing what it looks like to others." In his review of the adaptation for the Financial Times, Chris Dunkley referred to this issue, calling Cleese's Petruchio "an eccentrically pragmatic social worker using the wayward client's own doubtful habits to calm her down." Actress Sarah Badel had a similar conception of the psychology behind the production. She constructed an "imaginary biography" for Katherina, arguing, "She's a woman of such passion [...] a woman of such enormous capacity for love that the only way she could be happy is to find a man of equal capacity. Therefore she's mad for lack of love [...] he feigns madness, she is teetering on the edge of it. Petruchio is the only man who shows her what she's like."
Miller was determined that the adaptation not become a farce, and in that vein, two key texts for him during production were Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500–1800 and Michael Walzer's The Revolution of the Saints, which he used to help ground his interpretation of the play in recognisably Renaissance-esque societal terms; Petruchio's actions are based on accepted economic, social and religious views of the time, as are Baptista's. In tandem with this interpretation, the song sung at the end of the play is a musical version of Psalm 128 ("Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord"), which was often sung in Puritan households at the end of a meal during Shakespeare's own day, and which praised a peaceful family life. Speaking of the addition of the psalm, Miller states "I had to give [the conclusion] an explicitly religious format, so people could see it as not just simply the high-jinks of an intolerantly selfish man who was simply destroying a woman to satisfy his own vanity, but a sacramental view of the nature of marriage, whereby this couple had come to love each other by reconciling themselves to the demands of a society which saw obedience as a religious requirement."
Miller chose not to include the 'Induction' sequence from Shakespeare's script, which presents the rest of the play as a fiction being performed for a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly. He believed that the inherently theatrical and "folk style" device of the framing narrative would be difficult to do on television, as well as making the characters within the main story seeming like "actors in a story" rather than real people for the audience to identify with. With his camera, Miller focused on depth of field, using a telephoto lens and often placing characters in the front, middle, and back of a shot. This was intended to ensure the characters were always located within the world around them, and to show their actions emerging out of their culture. This episode premiered the new opening title sequence, and the new theme music by Stephen Oliver.- Wikipedia: The Taming of the Shrew
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Cast:
- John Franklyn-Robbins as Antonio
- John Nettles as Bassanio
- Gemma Jones as Portia
- Warren Mitchell as Shylock
- Leslee Udwin as Jessica
- Douglas Wilmer as The Duke of Venice
Although this episode screened to little controversy in the UK, in the US, it created a huge furore. As soon as WNET announced the broadcast date, the Holocaust and Executive Committee (HEC) of the Committee to Bring Nazi War Criminals to Justice sent them a letter demanding the show be cancelled. WNET also received protest letters from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and B'nai B'rith. Additionally, Morris Schappes, editor of Jewish Currents, wrote an open letter of protest to The New York Times. The HEC stated that Shylock can arouse "the deepest hate in the pathological and prejudiced mind," urging WNET "that reason and a reputable insight into the psychopathology of man will impel you to cancel [the play's] screening." They later stated, "our objection is not to art but to the hate monger, whoever the target [...] This includes the singular and particular work of art which when televised is viewed by millions and alarmingly compounds the spread of hate." The ADL stated that screening the episode would be "providing a forum for a Shylock who would have warmed the heart of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher." PBS and WNET issued a joint statement citing the protests of Saudi Arabians the previous year regarding the screening of Death of a Princess, a docudrama about the public execution of Princess Mishaal, and quoting PBS president Lawrence K. Grossman; "the healthy way to deal with such sensitivities is to air the concerns and criticism, not to bury or ban them." PBS and WNET also pointed out that both producer Jonathan Miller and actor Warren Mitchell are Jewish. For their part, Miller and director Jack Gold had anticipated the controversy and prepared for it. In the Stone/Hallinan press material, Gold stated, "Shylock's Jewishness in dramatic terms is a metaphor for the fact that he, more than any other character in Venice, is an alien." Miller stated, "it's not about Jews versus Christians in the racial sense; it's the world of legislation versus the world of mercy."
Director Jack Gold chose an unusual presentational method in this episode; completely realistic and authentic costumes, but a highly stylised non-representational set against which the characters contrast; "if you imagine different planes, the thing closest to the camera was the reality of the actor in a real costume – the costumes were totally real and very beautiful – then beyond the actor is a semi-artificial column or piece of wall, and in the distance is the backcloth, which is impressionistic."[311] The backcloths were used to suggest locale without photographic representationalism; they imply air, water, sea, hills, a city, but never actually show anything specific.
Geoff Feld won Best Cameraman at the 1981 BAFTAs for his work on this episode. This was the only production in the series in which no lines of dialogue (from the traditionally-used text) were cut.- Wikipedia: The Merchant of Venice
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Cast:
- Celia Johnson as Countess of Rousillion
- Ian Charleson as Bertram
- Michael Hordern as Lafeu
- Angela Down as Helena
- Peter Jeffrey as Parolles
- Donald Sinden as King of France
Director Elijah Moshinsky worked with the same lighting designer, John Summers, and sound engineer, Derek Miller-Timmins, for all five of his BBC productions. In line with producer Jonathan Miller's aesthetic policy, Moshinsky used the work of artists as visual influence. Of particular importance was Georges de La Tour. Moshinsky showed some of de La Tour's work to lighting technician John Summers, as he wanted to capture the dark/light contrast of the work, as well as the prominence of silhouettes and chiaroscuro effects common in the paintings. Summers loved this idea and worked it into his lighting. For example, he lit the scene where the widow agrees to Helena's wager as if it were illuminated by a single candle. To achieve this, he used a projector bulb hidden by objects on the table to simulate the sense of a single bright light source.
Moshinsky was also very careful about camera placement. The opening shot is a long shot of Helena, before eventually moving into a close-up. Of this opening, Moshinsky commented "I wanted to start with a long shot of Helena and not move immediately to close-up – I didn't want too much identification with her, I wanted a picture of a woman caught in an obsession, with the camera static when she speaks, clear, judging her words. I wanted to start with long shots because I felt they were needed to place people in their context and for the sake of atmosphere. I wanted the atmosphere to help carry the story." With the exception of one shot, every shot in the episode is an interior. The only exterior shot is that of Parolles as he passes the women looking out the window in Florence. The shot is framed in such a way, however, that none of the surroundings are seen. (This was one reason Moshinsky cut the two scenes with the Florentine Duke; along with being extraneous to the plot, they potentially required a sense of the outdoors.) For the shot where the King and Helena dance into the great hall, the scene was shot through a pane of glass which had the ceiling and walls of the hall painted on it, to give the appearance of a much larger and grander room than was actually present. The idea for the scenes between the King and Helena to be so sexually charged was actor Donald Sinden's own. The choice to cast Leach as the Widow was grounded in Moshinsky's desire not to have the role be a cameo from a comic actress, as often seen on stage. He wanted the Widow to be a fully-rounded character whom Helena could learn from.
Moshinsky has made contradictory statements about the end of the play. In the printed script, he indicated he felt that Bertram kissing Helena is a happy ending, but in press material for the US broadcast, he said he found the end to be sombre because none of the young characters had learnt anything. The final epilogue for the King was filmed, with Sinden before a stage curtain in make-up, but ultimately Moshinsky chose to omit it.- Wikipedia: All's Well That Ends Well
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Cast:Jane Howell (1935- ) would surely have to be seen as the stand-out talent of the entire BBC series. The brilliance of her Brechtian take on Shakespeare's first history tetralogy (Henry VI, 1, 2, 3 & Richard III) was revelatory to all those who (like me) thought of them as rather embarrassing relics of his apprenticeship years.
- Jeremy Kemp as Leontes
- Anna Calder-Marshall as Hermione
- Jeremy Dimmick as Mamillius
- Rikki Fulton as Autolycus
- Robin Kermode as Florizel
- Debbie Farrington as Perdita
- Pat Gorman as Bear
As with all of Jane Howell's productions, this episode was performed on a single set. The change of the seasons, so critical to the movement of the play, is indicated by a lone tree whose leaves change colour as the year moves on, with the background a monochromatic cycloramic curtain, which changed colour in tune with the changing colour of the leaves. Howell directed with a consciousness of the pace of the Elizabethan stage, for example noting that Shakespeare's actors would have been standing unless a seat was called for. Her costume designer, John Peacock, took inspiration from Botticelli for Perdita and from Bruegel for the peasants. Calder-Marshall and Burke were married.
- Wikipedia: The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale, her first production for the series, is almost equally powerful. The statue comes to life; the Stalinist drabness of the early acts thaws into the pastoral richness of Perdita's Bohemia. The fairy tale simplicity of the fable becomes movingly human in this wonderful version of the play.
Cast:...
- Jonathan Pryce as Timon
- John Shrapnel as Alcibiades
- Hugh Thomas as Lucius
- James Cossins as Lucullus
- Elyane Sharling as Phryina
- Diana Dors as Timandra
Michael Bogdanov was originally hired to direct this episode, but he resigned after his Oriental modern-dress interpretation was considered too radical, and Jonathan Miller reluctantly took over directorial duties. In the episode, Timon's seaside camp is littered with debris; half-buried statues and roofs of old houses from times past. This design concept stemmed from an idea Miller had originally had for Troilus and Cressida, which he was prepping when he took over Timon. The concept was that the Greek camp had been built on the ruins of old Troy, but now the remnants of the once buried city were beginning to surface from under the earth. For the scene when Timon loses his temper after the second banquet, actor Jonathan Pryce did not know how he wanted to play the scene, so Miller simply told him to improvise. This necessitated cameraman Jim Atkinson having to keep Pryce in shot without knowing beforehand where Pryce was going to go or what he was going to do. Only once, when Pryce seems as if he is about to bend over but then suddenly stops, did Atkinson lose Pryce from centre frame.
- Wikipedia: Timon of Athens
Cast:...
- Jane Lapotaire as Cleopatra
- Colin Blakely as Antony
- Janet Key as Charmian
- Emrys James as Enobarbus
- Ian Charleson as Octavius Caesar
- Geoffrey Collins as Dolabella
- Lynn Farleigh as Octavia
Although this episode was the last this season episode to air, it was the first episode shot under Jonathan Miller's producership. He purposely interpreted it in a manner divergent from most theatrical productions. Miller felt strongly that the play could only be understood not as true history but through the prism of Shakespeare's contemporaries, making this "a sixteenth-century version of Roman antiquity". (136). As a result he wanted to avoid literal scenery which, he argued, wouldn't be convincing as Ancient Egypt anyway. (136-137) He noted that we no longer live in the "romantic heroism" of previous centuries, who could view this figures unproblematically (142-143).[369] Whereas the love between Antony and Cleopatra is usually seen in a heightened manner, as a grand passion, Miller saw it as a love between two people well past their prime who are both on a "downhill slide, each scrambling to maintain a foothold". He compared Antony to a football player who had waited several seasons too long to retire, and Cleopatra to a "treacherous slut".[370] Miller used Paolo Veronese's The Family of Darius before Alexander as a major influence in his visual design of this episode, as it mixes both classical and Renaissance costumes in a single image.
This is one of only two episodes in which original Shakespearean text was substituted with additional material (the other is Love's Labour's Lost). Miller and his script editor David Snodin cut Act 3, Scene 10 and replaced it with the description of the Battle of Actium from Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which is delivered as an onscreen legend overlaying a painting of the battle.
During rehearsal of the scene with the snake, Jane Lapotaire, who suffers from ophidiophobia, was extremely nervous, but was assured the snake was well-trained. At that point, the snake crawled down the front of her dress towards her breast, before then moving around her back. During the shooting of the scene, Lapotaire kept her hands on the snake at all times.- Wikipedia: Antony and Cleopatra
Season 4:
(Produced by Jonathan Miller)
Cast:...
- Bob Hoskins as Iago
- Anthony Hopkins as Othello
- David Yelland as Cassio
- Penelope Wilton as Desdemona
- Rosemary Leach as Emilia
- Wendy Morgan as Bianca
Cedric Messina had planned to screen Othello during the second season, and had attempted to cast James Earl Jones as Othello. However, the British Actors' Equity Association had written into their contract with the BBC that only British actors could appear in the series, and if Messina cast Jones, Equity threatened to strike, thus crippling the show. Messina backed down and Othello was pushed back to a later season. By the time it was produced, Jonathan Miller had taken over as producer, and he decided that the play was not about race at all, casting a white actor in the role. Miller believed that "the play is thrown out of balance by making race the central issue" when the universal human emotion of jealousy underpins the plot and often has unclear motivations in people. Although white Othellos were still seen on the British stage until 1980, this became the last major production in the country to have a white actor playing the role in makeup. Jones would later see the production, concluding that Hopkins "seemed lost".
During production, Miller based the visual design on the work of El Greco. He opted for an unadorned, monochrome costume design as the colours of the script are in the emotion of the characters. The monochrome was offset by touches of red and umber. The Venetian council chamber was based on a Joos van Wassenhove painting of the Duke of Urbino listening to a lecture. Scenic artist Alan Matthews painted the Tintoretto paintings.[391] The interior design was also based on the interiors of the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, while the street set was based on a real street in Cyprus.[392] Miller and Hoskins conceived of Iago as a classic trickster figure from ancient mythology. Hoskins said that his main acting note "was to do him as Rumplestiltskin".
For the scene where Iago asks Cassio about Bianca, Othello stands behind the open door. Most of the scene is shot from behind him, so the audience sees what he sees. However, not all the dialogue between Iago and Cassio is audible, which led to criticism when the episode was screened in the US, where it was assumed that the sound people simply had not done their job. It was, in fact, an intentional choice; if Othello is having difficulty hearing what they are saying, so too is the audience. Miller chose to omit the material with the clown and the musicians to ensure a dramatic throughline.- Wikipedia: Othello
Cast:...
- Charles Gray as Pandarus
- Anton Lesser as Troilus
- Suzanne Burden as Cressida
- The Incredible Orlando as Thersites
- John Shrapnel as Hector
- Elayne Sharling as Cassandra
- Paul Moriarty as Diomedes
- Ann Pennington as Helen
- Merelina Kendall as Andromache
- Tim Potter as Clown
Director Jonathan Miller used the work of gothic painter Lucas Cranach as primary visual influence during this production. Several of Cranach's sketches can be seen in Ajax's tent, most notably, Eve from his Adam and Eve woodcut, hung on the tent like a nude centrefold. Miller wanted Troy to be sharply differentiated from Greece; Troy was decadent, with clear abstract lines (based on some of Hans Vredeman de Vries' architectural experiments with perspective). Costumes were elegant and bright, based on the works of Cranach and Albrecht Dürer because they seemed "poised on the edge of a new world" between the age of Chaucer and the Renaissance.[407] The Greek camp, on the other hand, was based on a gypsy camp near the BBC Television Centre; cluttered, dirty and squalid. Miller envisioned it as built on the remains of an earlier Troy, with bits of roofs jutting out of the ground and bits and pieces of ancient statues lying around (although this idea originated for Troilus, Miller had first used it in his earlier Timon of Athens). Also, on one side of the camp, a huge wooden horse leg can be seen under construction – the Trojan Horse. In the command tent, a schematic for the horse is visible in several scenes, as is a scale model on the desk nearby. Miller wanted the camp to give the sense of "everything going downhill," with the men demoralised, fed up fighting, wanting only to get drunk and sleep (except Ulysses, who is depicted as still fully alert) The uniforms were all khaki coloured, and although Renaissance in style, were based on the TV show M*A*S*H, with Thersites specifically based on Corporal Klinger.
Of the play, Miller stated "it's ironic, it's farcical, it's satirical: I think it's an entertaining, rather frothily ironic play. It's got a bitter-sweet quality, rather like black chocolate. It has a wonderfully light ironic touch and I think it should be played ironically, not with heavy-handed agonising on the dreadful futility of it all."[408] Miller chose to set the play in a Renaissance milieu rather than a classical one, as he felt it was really about Elizabethan England rather than ancient Troy, and as such, he hoped the production would carry relevance for a contemporary TV audience; "I feel that Shakespeare's plays and all the works of the classic rank, of literary antiquity, must necessarily be Janus-faced. And one merely pretends that one is producing pure Renaissance drama; I think one has to see it in one's own terms. Because it is constantly making references, one might as well be a little more specific about it. Now that doesn't mean that I want to hijack them for the purposes of making the plays address themselves specifically to modern problems. I think what one wants to do is to have these little anachronistic overtones so that we're constantly aware of the fact that the play is, as it were, suspended in the twentieth-century imagination, halfway between the period in which it was written and the period in which we are witnessing it. And then there is of course a third period being referred to, which is the period of the Greek antiquity."
During rehearsals, Miller saw Cressida not as an ethically corrupt person but as an innocent who finds herself enjoying the game rather than processing it seriously. Burden somewhat disagreed, seeing Cressida as a witty and intelligent young woman but one who is still discovering herself, and whose survival instincts kick in when she is taken to the Greek camp.[410] The lover's meeting scene, at eleven minutes, was the longest single-camera take in the production.[411] Act 5 scene 9 was rehearsed but had to be cut when time ran out during the studio session; the same happened to an intended moment of Achilles entering carrying Patroclus's body in Act 5 scene 5.- Wikipedia: Troilus and Cressida
Cast:...
- Estelle Kohler as Hippolyta
- Nigel Davenport as Theseus
- Pippa Guard as Hermia
- Cherith Mellor as Helena
- Geoffrey Palmer as Quince
- Brian Glover as Bottom
- Phil Daniels as Puck
- Helen Mirren as Titania
- Peter McEnery as Oberon
Jonathan Miller planned on directing this episode himself, with fairies inspired by the work of Inigo Jones and Hieronymus Bosch, but he directed Timon of Athens instead, after original director Michael Bogdanov quit that production. Elijah oshinsky called his production in part "an homage to Max Reinhardt, who directed the play several times in the first half of the twentieth century in a style that paid tribute to the 19th century romantic conception, and subsequently adapted the play into a 1935 film. As such, Moshinsky based his fairies on the baroque eroticism of Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens; in particular Rembrandt's Danaë was used as the inspiration for Titania's bed. Fashioning a darker production than is usual for this play, Moshinsky referred to the style of the adaptation as "romantic realism."[89] As a result, the backgrounds were abstract and impressionist, while the props and key set items, including the animals, were real in the foreground. Designer David Myerscough-Jones added to this with touches of seventeenth-century Cavalier-style. Miller disliked productions which portrayed Puck as a mischievous but harmless and lovable sprite, so he had Phil Daniels play him as if he were an anti-establishment punk, with A Clockwork Orange as a reference point for the character's anarchic nature. Unlike most productions on screen, Puck doesn't disappear or travel quickly using camera tricks, but is sweaty when he returns from errands, becoming more seemingly human. It has long been rumoured, but never confirmed, that in his portrayal of Peter Quince, actor Geoffrey Palmer was imitating the soon-to-retire Director General of the BBC, Ian Trethowan.
- Wikipedia: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Season 5:
(Produced by Shaun Sutton)
Cast:...
- John Shrapnel as Earl of Kent
- Norman Rodway as Earl of Gloucester
- Michael Kitchen as Edmund
- Michael Hordern as King Lear
- Brenda Blethyn as Cordelia
- Anton Lesser as Edgar
- Frank Middlemass as Fool
Originally, Cedric Messina cast Robert Shaw to play Lear, with an aim to do the show during the second season with a different director, but Shaw died suddenly in 1978 before production could begin, and the play was pushed back.[431] Jonathan Miller, who took over as producer of the series from Messina, had previously directed a Nottingham Playhouse production of King Lear in 1969, starring Michael Hordern as Lear and Frank Middlemass as the Fool. In 1975, he remounted that production for the BBC Play of the Month, which happened to be the BBC's last Shakespeare production prior to the beginning of the Television Shakespeare. During his time as producer, Miller tried to persuade the BBC to re-air the Play of the Month production in place of a new King Lear, but this was rejected, and a new production expected. At the end of the fourth season, when Miller concluded his time as producer, his contract stipulated that he still had one production to direct. Incoming producer Shaun Sutton offered him Love's Labour's Lost, but Miller wanted to do a tragedy. Of the three remaining tragedies, Miller had never directed Macbeth or Coriolanus, but felt comfortable with Lear.
The production was much the same as his 1969/1975 version, with Hordern and Middlemass reprising their roles alongside Penelope Wilton as Regan, and similar concepts for the design, costume, and lighting. However where that production had a truncated text, this used much more of Shakespeare's script.[356] Miller used a "board and drapes" approach to the play; all interiors were shot on or near a plain wooden platform while all exteriors were shot against a cycloramic curtain with dark tarpaulins. As such, although exteriors and interiors were clearly distinguished from one another, both were nonrepresentational.[432] Miller had considered using a built set but he was inspired by a book of Irving Penn photographs shared with him by his son, which featured people photographed in front of cloth drapes. The useful byproduct of having no set was that more funds could be spent on costumes. Lear's throne was reused from Miller's production of Troilus and Cressida, now painted black.
To enhance the starkness of the look of the production, Miller had lighting technician John Treays desaturate the colour by 30 per cent.[434] Miller also used colour to connect characters; the Fool wears white makeup which washes off during the storm, Edgar wears a white mask when he challenges Edmund to fight, and Cordelia wears white makeup after her death. Similarly, the Fool has red feathers in his hat, Edgar has a red tunic, and Cordelia's red welts on her neck stand out starkly against the white of her skin after her death.
In Miller's earlier versions, the Fool was not in the opening scene (in line with the text). This time, his addition gave the character a stronger personal and protective connection to Cordelia. Hordern adjusted his performance to criticism he had previously received that his Lear was not "regal" enough. He noted that the only chance an actor has to show Lear in his role as King is in the first scene. Although some critics disagreed with Miller's choice to cast a fool in his 60s, Miller argued that the character's wisdom and his "reproving peevishness" didn't make sense in a young person.- Wikipedia: King Lear
Cast:...
- Alan Bennett as Justice Shallow
- Richard Griffiths as Sir John Falstaff
- Miranda Foster as Anne Page
- Judy Davis as Mistress Ford
- Prunella Scales as Mistress Page
- Ron Cook as Peter Simple
- Elizabeth Spriggs as Mistress Quickly
- Ben Kingsley as Frank Ford
Director David Jones wanted to shoot the episode in Stratford-upon-Avon but was restricted to a studio setting. Determined that the production be as realistic as possible, Jones had designer Dom Homfray base the set on real Tudor houses associated with Shakespeare; Falstaff's room is based on the home of Mary Arden (Shakespeare's mother) in Wilmcote, and the wives' houses are based on the house of Shakespeare's daughter Susanna, and her husband, John Hall. For the background of exterior shots, he used a miniature Tudor village built of plasticine.
Jones was determined that the two wives not be clones of one another, so he had them appear as if Page was a well-established member of the bourgeoisie and Ford a member of the nouveau riche.- Wikipedia: The Merry Wives of Windsor
Cast:
- Peter Benson as King Henry VI
- Brenda Blethyn as Joan La Pucelle
- Antony Brown as Duke of Burgundy
- David Burke as Duke of Gloucester
- Bernard Hill as Master Gunner/Duke of York
- Trevor Peacock as Lord Talbot
- Ian Saynor as Charles, Dauphin of France
- Mark Wing-Davey as Earl of Warwick
Although airing after King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, this was produced before, as part of Jonathan Miller's time leading the series. Inspired by the notion that the political intrigues behind the Wars of the Roses often seemed like playground squabbles, Howell and production designer Oliver Bayldon staged the four plays in a single set resembling a children's adventure playground. They found their idea for the set in a medieval-themed adventure playground in Fulham, with power plants on the horizon, which seemed to Bayldon like a symbol of encroaching modernity.[458] Little attempt was made at realism within the design. For example, Bayldon did not disguise the parquet flooring ("it stops the set from literally representing [...] it reminds us we are in a modern television studio"[459]), and in all four productions, the title of the play is displayed within the set itself (on banners in The First Part and The Second Part (where it is visible throughout the entire first scene), on a shroud in The Third Part, and written on a chalkboard by Richard himself in The Tragedy of Richard III). Costumes were designed with blocks of colour for each of the main characters, to keep them identifiable to the audience, with the colours darkening as the play goes on.[458] Many critics felt these set design choices lent the production an air of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt.
An element of verfremdungseffekt in this production is seen when Gloucester and Winchester encounter one another at the Tower; both are on horseback, but the horses they ride are hobbyhorses, which actors David Burke and Frank Middlemass cause to pivot and prance as they speak. The ridiculousness of this situation works to "effectively undercut their characters' dignity and status."[462] The "anti-illusionist" set was also used as a means of political commentary; as the four plays progressed, the set decayed and became more and more dilapidated as social order becomes more fractious.[463] In the same vein, the costumes become more and more monotone as the four plays move on – The First Part of Henry the Sixt features brightly coloured costumes which clearly distinguish the various combatants from one another, but by The Tragedy of Richard III, everyone fights in similarly coloured dark costumes, with little to differentiate one army from another.[464] With most of the cast members performing a variety of small and large roles over the four productions, in the manner of repertory theatre, Howell also cast a "second company" of young actors trained in stage combat. These actors would perform the battle sequences, and had to battle the fight arranger, Malcolm Ranson, as part of their audition.- Wikipedia: The First Part of Henry the Sixt
...
...
Cast:...
- Peter Benson as King Henry VI
- David Daker as Duke of Buckingham
- Julia Foster as Queen Margaret
- Bernard Hill as Duke of York
- Frank Middlemass as Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester
- Trevor Peacock as Sheriff/Jack Cade
- Brian Protheroe as Edward Plantagenet
- Mark Wing-Davey as Earl of Warwick
Jonathan Miller's last play as producer, this production was filmed on the same set as The First Part of Henry the Sixt. However, designer Oliver Bayldon altered the set so it would appear that the paintwork was flaking and peeling, and the set falling into a state of disrepair, as England descended into an ever-increasing state of chaos.[463] Bayldon felt that the design should still invoke a "play park" but now one that had been boarded up and whitewashed, and become sinister in the process.[474] In the same vein, the costumes became more and more monotone as the four plays went on; The First Part of Henry the Sixt features brightly coloured costumes which clearly distinguish the various combatants from one another, but by The Tragedy of Richard III, everyone fights in similarly coloured dark costumes, with little to differentiate one army from another.[464] Costume designer John Peacock said that "at first the designs were costumes, but now they are becoming clothes". The cyclorama at the back of the set was lit with a blue light to obscure the gold threads in the cloth which had glimmered in the first part.
A strong element of verfremdungseffekt in this production is the use of doubling, particularly in relation to actors David Burke and Trevor Peacock. Burke plays Henry's most loyal servant, Gloucester, but after Gloucester's death, he plays Jack Cade's right-hand man, Dick the Butcher. Peacock plays Cade himself, having previously appeared in The First Part of Henry the Sixt as Lord Talbot, representative of the English chivalry so loved by Henry. Both actors play complete inversions of their previous characters, re-creating both an authentically Elizabethan theatrical practice and providing a Brechtian political commentary.[475][476] The tetralogy was taped not long after the 1981 England riots and during the early stages of the Falklands War, and Howell related these political issues to the cast as part of the topical nature of the play. She made care not to romanticise the plays' commoners either, who were often the "thickest, daftest people", and saw Jack Cade as a neo-fascist from the National Front. To help clarify some moments in the play, additional lines were taken from the 1594 quarto publication of the play, The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster. The origin of that text, which varies in many places from the standard (First Folio) text of the play, provides lines in scenes 1.1, 1.3, and 2.1.- Wikipedia: The Second Part of Henry the Sixt
...
Cast:...
- Peter Benson as King Henry VI
- Paul Chapman as Earl Rivers
- Ron Cook as Richard, Duke of Gloucester
- Rowena Cooper as Lady Elizabeth Grey, later Queen to Edward IV
- Julia Foster as Queen Margaret
- Bernard Hill as the Duke of York
- Brian Protheroe as Edward, Earl of March, later Edward IV
- Nick Reding as Edward, Prince of Wales
- Mark Wing-Davey as Earl of Warwick
This episode was filmed on the same set as The First Part of Henry the Sixt and The Second Part of Henry the Sixt. However, designer Oliver Bayldon altered the set so it would appear to be falling apart, as England descended into an even worse state of chaos.[463] The cyclorama around the set was repainted with grey rolled over the gauze. Said Bayldon: "The adventure playground has become burned and charred—colours have been subdued to black and grey, and the colour of charred timber".[478] The fights were designed to have very strong violence here, deliberately in contrast to the "knockabout" violence of The First Part.
The scene where Richard kills Henry has three biblical references carefully worked out by Howell: as Richard drags Henry away, his arms spread out into a crucified position; on the table at which he sat are seen bread and wine; and in the background, an iron crossbar is illuminated against the black stone wall.[479] Howell's editing uses more frequent cuts as the tetralogy progresses, emphasising the growing violence and tension in a divided England.[480] Although the tetralogy takes place over decades, Howell chose not to focus on heavy ageing makeup. As Shakespeare's fidelity to historical fact is often not accurate, and the theatricality of the plays was already being emphasised, Howell decreed that any ageing makeup would be restricted to minor details.- Wikipedia: The Third Part of Henry the Sixt
Jane Howell, dir.: The Battle of Tewkesbury: it's hard to tell the Yorkists from the Lancastrians (1982-83)...
Cast:...
- Michael Byrne as Duke of Buckingham
- Anne Carroll as Jane Shore
- Ron Cook as Richard III
- Rowena Cooper as Queen Elizabeth
- Annette Crosbie as Duchess of York
- David Daker as Lord Hastings
- Dorian Ford as Edward, Prince of Wales
- Patsy Kensit as Lady Margaret Plantagenet
- Zoë Wanamaker as Lady Anne
This episode was filmed on the same set as the three Henry VI plays. However, designer Oliver Bayldon altered the set so it would appear to be a ruin, as England reached its lowest point of chaos.[463] The various doors in the set, which were prominent in the previous instalments, are now boarded up and derelict. For Bayldon, "the play-park of Henry VI Part 1 is now Belfast. Although the overall colour design is dark, there are new splashes of colour on the doors, playing up the higher level of comedy in this play. Green, which had previously not been used in the design, appears for the first time on Richmond's banners, giving the feeling of his arrival breathing life into England. For the costumes, Howell wanted "the effect of three-piece suits" in a medieval vein, with sleeker, cleaner-looking costumes than earlier in the tetralogy. The sequence with the Lord Mayor putting on old armour allowed Howell to make the direct visual comparison back to the bright costumes of the previous plays. To show Richard without his shirt on, in the final sequence, fifteen prosthetic humps were made to find one that would look the most natural.
As this version of Richard III functioned as the fourth part of a series, it meant that much of the text usually cut in standalone productions could remain. The most obvious beneficiary of this was the character of Margaret, whose role, if not removed completely, is usually truncated. Textual editor David Snodin was especially pleased that a filmed version of Richard III was finally presenting Margaret's full role.[484] Director Jane Howell also saw the unedited nature of the tetralogy as important for Richard himself, arguing that without the three Henry VI plays "it is impossible to appreciate Richard except as some sort of diabolical megalomaniac," whereas in the full context of the tetralogy "you've seen why he is created, you know how such a man can be created: he was brought up in war, he saw and knew nothing else from his father but the struggle for the crown, and if you've been brought up to fight, if you've got a great deal of energy, and physical handicaps, what do you do? You take to intrigue and plotting."[485] The production is unusual amongst filmed Richards insofar as no one is killed on camera, other than Richard himself. This was a conscious choice on the part of Howell; "you see nobody killed; just people going away, being taken away – so much like today; they're just removed. There's a knock on the door and people are almost willing to go. There's no way out of it."[486] Howell emphasised the recurring use of actors, bringing back many of the most prominent faces of previous plays in smaller parts, so that "Richard III should be like a nightmare. Faces will keep coming back".
At 239 minutes, this production was the longest episode in the entire series, and when the series was released on DVD in 2005, it was the only adaptation split over two disks. Of the 3,887 lines constituting the First Folio text of the play, Howell cut only 72; roughly 1.8% of the total.- Wikipedia: The Tragedy of Richard III
Season 6:
(Produced by Shaun Sutton)
Cast:...
- Richard Johnson as Cymbeline
- Hugh Thomas as Cornelius
- Claire Bloom as Queen
- Helen Mirren as Imogen
- Michael Pennington as Posthumus
- Paul Jesson as Cloten
- Robert Lindsay as Iachimo
- Michael Gough as Belarius
- Michael Hordern as Jupiter
From this episode on, the show featured no unique theme music; the opening titles were scored with music composed specifically for the episode; although the new title sequence introduced by Miller at the start of the third season continued to be used.
Moshinsky took many of his visual inspirations from the artworks of Rembrandt and Vermeer. He was inspired by Rembrandt's portrait of Angela Bas for his conception of Imogen as someone "quite severe and yet young and quite princess-like".
Mohsinsky saw the play's focus as moral ambiguity, with Pisanio a central symbol as no-one knows whether he's good or bad. He viewed this as the opposite of his production of All's Well That Ends Well; where that was a "social, realistic" world, Cymbeline became a "nightmare realism". Moshinsky felt this to be a dark play in which only the literal intervention of the gods stops it from becoming a tragedy, and thus it needed "the intensity and neuroticism of a tragedy". Moshinsky shot the scene of Iachimo watching the sleeping Imogen in the same way as he shot the scene of Imogen finding Cloten in bed beside her; as Iachimo leaves the room, the camera is at the head of the bed, and as such, Imogen appears upside-down in frame. Later, when she awakes to find the headless Cloten, the scene begins with the camera in the same position, with Imogen once again upside-down; "the inverted images visually bind the perverse experiences, both nightmarish, both sleep related, both lit by one candle." The decision to have Imogen be almost successfully seduced by Iachimo was, Moshinsky told the Radio Times, because Imogen should not be "a good person in a world of evil" but a victim of Iachimo, who aggressively "but cunningly wheedles the evil side out of other people ... His evil depends on having made the other person guilty".
During the episode, the battle between the Romans and the Britons is never shown on screen; all that is seen is a single burning building, intended to indicate the general strife; we never see the defeat of Iachimo, Posthumus sparing him or Iachimo's reaction. Moshinsky did not want to expunge the political context of the play, but he was not especially interested in the military theme, and so removed most of it, with an aim to focus instead on the personal. The cuts were designed to "make a complex tale clearer by ridding it of comparative irrelevancies and highlighting certain moments and themes". Many cuts emerged during rehearsal, as Moshinsky discovered scenes that didn't fit with the "high level of emotional intensity" he thought necessary to realise the play on screen; the second half was more rigorously cut, including material with Belarius and the princes. He also sought to restructure scenes and sequences, especially in Act IV, as the audience would build connections to several characters, and would relate more if intercut between them rather than having slow sequences of development with each one in turn.- Wikipedia: Cymbeline
Cast:...
- Nicol Williamson as Macbeth
- Ian Hogg as Banquo
- Jane Lapotaire as Lady Macbeth
- James Bolam as Porter
- Tony Doyle as Macduff
- Jill Baker as Lady Macduff
This episode was shot with a 360-degree cycloramic backcloth in the background which could be used as representative of a general environment, with much use made of open space.
David Richard, in the Washington Post, felt this was "one of the strongest offerings in the series to date". Williamson's "harsh" voice and Lapotaire's "sleek grace" combined to give a production of true distinction. Arthur Unger, in the Christian Science Monitor, praised Williamson for an "unforgettable" portrayal: "He grasps one of the most fascinating Shakespearean roles like a dog with a bone in his mouth" and creates a Macbeth that will be "remembered for all time", even if he sometimes mumbled and underplayed the role. His was a "savage and riven ...naïve and self-deceived" character. Meanwhile, Lapotaire sometimes exaggerated to a ludicrous degree as part of a strong characterisation. Unger concluded that, while Gold's production couldn't always decide whether it wanted to be stylised or naturalistic, "it is not a perfect Macbeth but it is an unforgettable Macbeth". In the Globe and Mail, Rick Groen appreciated the "streamlined production" in Gold's "subdued, almost elliptical interpretation", which highlighted Williamson's talent at creating an intimate Macbeth: "the inward view proves far more horrific than any outward show". Lapotaire was every bit Williamson's equal, playing a successful game of power and sexual desire. The bleak setting and moral equivocation of the characters were well-utilised, along with the ending implying that Fleance will continue the trend of bloodshed.- Wikipedia: Macbeth
Cast:...
- Cyril Cusack as Aegeon
- Charles Gray as Solinus, Duke of Ephesus
- Bunny Reed as Gaoler
- Michael Kitchen as The Antipholi
- Roger Daltrey as The Dromios
- Wendy Hiller as Aemelia
Director James Cellan Jones felt very strongly that the play was not just a farce, but included a serious side, specifically represented by the character of Aegeon, who has lost his family and is about to lose his life. In several productions Jones had seen, Aegeon was completely forgotten between the first and last scenes, and determined to avoid this, and hence give the production a more serious air, Jones had Aegeon wandering around Ephesus throughout the episode.
The entire production takes place on a stylised set, the floor of which is a giant map of the region, shown in its entirety in the opening and closing aerial shots; all of the main locations (the Porpentine, the Abbey, the Phoenix, the market etc.) are located in a circular pattern around the centre map. While most stage productions have separate actors playing each Antipholus and each Dromio, Jones chose to double-cast the actors and use special effects for the final scene. The production's composer, Richard Holmes, appears onscreen as the street band's harpsichord player. The sea backdrop had staples placed through it, so the light would glimmer in the sunlight and then moonlight.- Wikipedia: The Comedy of Errors
Cast:...
- Frank Barrie as Sir Eglamour
- Tessa Peake-Jones as Julia
- Hetta Charnley as Lucetta
- Tyler Butterworth as Proteus
- John Hudson as Valentine
- Paul Daneman as Duke of Milan
The music in this episode was created by Anthony Rooley, who wrote new arrangements of works from Shakespeare's own time, such as John Dowland's piece 'Lachrimae'. Performed by The Consort of Musicke, other musicians whose music was used include William Byrd, Thomas Campion, Anthony Holborne, John Johnson, Thomas Morley and Orazio Vecchi. As no original music was used, Stephen Oliver's theme from seasons three to five was used for the opening titles.
Director Don Taylor initially planned a representational setting for the film; Verona, Milan and the forest were all to be realistic. However, he changed his mind early in preproduction and had production designer Barbara Gosnold go in the opposite direction, choosing a stylised setting. To this end, the forest is composed of metal poles with bits of green tinsel and brown sticks stuck to them (the cast and crew referred to the set as "Christmas at Selfridges"). While the set for Verona was more realistic, that for Milan featured young extras dressed like cherubs. This was to convey the idea that the characters lived in a "Garden of Courtly Love", slightly divorced from everyday reality.[536] Working in tandem with this idea, upon Proteus's arrival in Milan, after meeting Silvia, he is left alone on stage, and the weather suddenly changes from calm and sunny to cloudy and windy, accompanied by a thunderclap. The implication being that Proteus has brought a darkness within him into the garden of courtly delights previously experienced by Silvia.
Although the production is edited in a fairly conventional manner, much of it was shot in extremely long takes, and then edited into sections, rather than actually shooting in sections. Taylor would shoot most of the scenes in single takes, as he felt this enhanced performances and allowed actors to discover aspects which they never would have had everything been broken up into pieces.- Wikipedia: The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Cast:...
- Joss Ackland as Menenius
- Alan Howard as Caius Marcius
- Patrick Godfrey as Cominius
- Mike Gwilym as Aufidius
- Irene Worth as Volumnia
- Joanna McCallum as Virgilia
For the production design of Rome, everywhere except the Senate was to be small and cramped. The idea behind this design choice was to reflect Coriolanus's mindset. He dislikes the notion of the people gathering together for anything, and on such a cramped set, because the alleys and streets are so small, it only takes a few people to make them look dangerously crowded. The red interior of the tent during the scene where Volumnia and the women come to plead for Coriolanus's assistance was intended to be "womblike". When an actor was in close-up, Moshinsky adopted an aesthetic choice of keeping them off-centre in the frame.
Moshinsky had minimal television experience when he first joined the BBC series. Now, he found himself moving away from his earlier "painterly" approach toward productions that engaged more with an interpretative issue in the play. He concluded that it would be difficult to explore the contemporary political relevance of the play on television, because it is not a medium where you can debate directly with the audience, unlike theatre. He felt that "you either direct it as an epic play about a political debate or as a study of an alienated state of mind", and, if the latter, some of the more public sequences could be cut to keep the focus on the interpretation. In the script for the episode, Coriolanus's death scene is played as a fight between himself and Aufidius in front of a large crowd who urge Aufidius to kill him. However, in shooting the scene, Moshinsky changed it so that it takes place in front of a few silent senators, and there is, as such, no real fight. For cutting substantial amounts of the text that were more political and less personal, Moshinsky received hate mail from some American viewers, who found the cutting "sacriligeous".
For the portrayal of Volumnia, Moshinsky and Worth examined what they felt would be the weakness of such a domineering character, and concluded it was in her over-fondness for family. As a result, Volumnia is clearly fond of her daughter-in-law, which is not always the case in stage productions. Moshinsky wanted to make clear "the power of the sexuality" that underlines the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius, and motivates their mutual hatred. To emphasises the subtext of homoeroticism, when Caius Marcius fights the Coriolian soldiers, he leaves his shirt on, but when he fights Aufidius in one-on-one combat, he takes it off.- Wikipedia: The Tragedy of Coriolanus
Season 7:
(Produced by Shaun Sutton)
Cast:...
- Leonard Rossiter as King John
- Mary Morris as Queen Elinor
- Luc Owen as Arthur, Duke of Britaine
- Claire Bloom as Constance
- Rusty Livingstone as Prince Henry
For this production, director David Giles chose to go with a stylised setting. He viewed the first three acts as "emblematic" and "heraldic", and stressed this through the bright blue set of Acts 2 and 3. Giles saw the last two acts as "more realistic", and as a result the colours are more muted.[556] The music for the production was written by Colin Sell. Leonard Rossiter died in October 1984, the month before the production first aired.
- Wikipedia: The Life and Death of King John
Cast:...
- Edward Petherbridge as Gower
- Mike Gwilym as Pericles
- Annette Crosbie as Dionyza
- Juliet Stevenson as Thaisa
- Amanda Redman as Marina
Director David Jones used long shots in this episode to try to create the sense of a small person taking in a vast world. During rehearsal, Jones stressed to the actors that they should look for the simple narrative through-line rather than over-complicating the play by looking for the subtext, as actors usually would with Shakespeare. Jones felt that the style of the play meant that characters and situations would not stand up to that level of examination. For his design, Jones wanted the "feel" of the ancient Mediterranean but without capturing any particular historical or ethnic look in each of the lands which Pericles visits. The costumes were designed from North African and Arab styles. Jones and designer Don Taylor aimed to create a world where the sea was a constant theme but where the viewer would never explicitly see water. To tie the narrative together, Jones added the goddess Diana—who makes her appearance in the final act—to two previous sequences. Actress Elayne Sharling, as Diana, appears at the end of 1.4 comforting a starving famine victim, and again in 3.3 holding a dove, both times witnessing Pericles's acts of generosity.
Annette Crosbie thought of Dionyza as an early version of Alexis Colby, Joan Collins's character in Dynasty. Mike Gwilym viewed Pericles as "Candide on an Odyssey".
Jones assessed two "big holes" in the text which needed to be dealt with. The first was the brothel scene (4.6). Jones followed other directors, such as Terry Hands for the RSC, in taking material from George Wilkins's 1608 novel, The Painful Adventures of Pericles. Wilkins is the most common candidate for Shakespeare's collaborator on the play, and his novel is believed to be a "novelisation" to capitalise on the play's success, so has been used in numerous editions to clarify difficult parts of the play text, which scholars agree has serious textual issues due to the quality of the printing. Two pages of Wilkins's novel were translated to blank verse and added to the production, to explain why Lysimachus is at the brothel and make the scene where Marina wins him over more convincing. The second "big hole" was the stage direction "Marina sings" in 5.1, as the music and lyrics are not included in Shakespeare's text, but the music has significant theatrical importance as the moment Marina heals the depressed Pericles. Unable to find an appropriate song in the source texts, Jones asked the production's composer, Martin Best, to write new lyrics which followed the pattern of an original song from Lawrence Twine's 1576 prose novel, one of the sources for Shakespeare's play.- Wikipedia: Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cast:...
- Lee Montague as Leonato
- Cherie Lunghi as Beatrice
- Katharine Levy as Hero
- Jon Finch as Don Pedro
- Robert Lindsay as Benedick
- Robert Reynolds as Claudio
- Michael Elphick as Dogberry
The inaugural episode of the entire series was originally set to be a production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Donald McWhinnie, and starring Penelope Keith and Michael York. The episode was shot (for £250,000), edited and publicly announced as the opening of the series, before it was pulled from the schedule and replaced with Romeo & Juliet, originally intended as the second episode. No reasons were given by the BBC for this decision. Initial newspaper reports suggested that the episode had been postponed for reshoots, due to an unspecified actor's "very heavy accent," and concerns that US audiences would not be able to understand the dialogue. However, no reshoots materialised, and internal evidence at the BBC suggests management simply regarded the production as a failure.
The play was finally adapted in the final season. Director Stuart Burge considered shooting the entire episode against a blank tapestry background, with no set whatsoever, but it was felt that audiences would not respond well to this. Ultimately the production used "stylized realism"; the environments are suggestive of their real-life counterparts, the foregrounds are broadly realistic representations, but the backgrounds tended to be more artificial; "a representational context close to the actors, with a more stylized presentation of distance." Burge took his design inspiration from 16th and 17th century Sicily, so designer Jan Spoczynski could also incorporate Turkish and Moorish influences. The costumes were inspired by early Elizabethan designs, as there are specific references to the clothing styles and items in the text. Costume designer June Hudson used Elizabethan patterns held in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Hudson chose animals as the inspiration for the masks at the Act 1 party, to contrast with the human skulls later scene in Hero's crypt.
Burge cast Beatrice and Benedick younger than they were typically seen in British stage productions at the time. He felt the play should be about young love. Beatrice, in Burge's view, is "much the strongest character" in the play and should be "sexually attractive, tremendously independent". She stands out not because she is an older, unmarried lady but because her independence separates her from the traditional romantic desires of the men. Composer Simon Rogers based his music on 16th century Italian folk songs.- Wikipedia: Much Ado About Nothing
Cast:My own recollection of this production is that it was pretty hard work. If there's a solution to the problem of making this incredibly artificial play appealing to modern audiences, this certainly wasn't it.
- Jonathan Kent as The King of Navarre
- Mike Gwilym as Berowne
- David Warner as Don Armado
- John Kane as Moth
- Maureen Lipman as The Princess of France
- Petra Markham as Katharine
- Jenny Agutter as Rosaline
This is the only play of the series to be set in the eighteenth century. Director Elijah Moshinsky took as inspiration the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, especially his use of fête galante in pictures such as L'Embarquement pour Cythère, the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the writing of Pierre de Marivaux. Of the play, Moshinsky said, "it has the atmosphere of Marivaux – which is rather delicious, and yet full of formalised rules between men and women, sense against sensibility; there's a distinction between enlightenment and feeling. I think the atmosphere of Watteau's paintings suits this enormously well and gives it a lightness of touch. And also it abstracts it; we don't want anything too realistic because the whole thing is a kind of mathematical equation – four men for four women – and the play is testing certain propositions about love." To capture the fête galante style, Moshinsky had lighting technician John Summers use footlights (as opposed to the usual method of ceiling lighting) for the exterior scenes involving the Princess and her ladies. He also shot sequences through a very light gauze to create a softness in line and colour.
For Moshinsky, the central episode of the production is the play-within-the-play in the final scene which is interrupted by the arrival of Marcade with bad news, a moment to which Moshinsky refers as "an astonishing sleight of hand about reality and the reflection of experiencing reality." He argues that the audience is so wrapped up in watching the characters watch the pageant that they have forgotten reality. The arrival of Marcade with news of the death of the King of France jolts the audience back to reality in the same way it jolts the eight main characters. In this sense, Moshinsky sees the play more as about artifice and reality than romantic relationships. In rehearsal, the character of Holofernes had a cat, on which he doted, which was designed to make the character more sympathetic. But the cat proved too distracting for the performers and crew, and the only cats available were black, which got lost on camera against Holofernes's black coat, so the animal was dismissed.
This was one of two productions which replaced original dialogue with material from outside the play (the other was Antony & Cleopatra). Here, in an invented scene set between Act 2 Scene 1 and Act 3, Scene 1, Berowne is shown drafting the poem to Rosaline, which will later be read by Nathaniel to Jacquenetta. The lines in this invented scene (delivered in voice-over) are taken from the fifth poem of the William Jaggard publication The Passionate Pilgrim, a variant of Berowne's final version of his own poem.- Wikipedia: Love's Labour's Lost
Mind you, Elijah Moshinsky is not the only one to have fallen at this particular hurdle. Kenneth Branagh's own Love's Labour's Lost, his fourth Shakespearean adaptation - after the trilogy of Henry V (1989), Much Ado about Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996) - was, according to Wikipedia, "a box-office and critical disappointment."
Branagh was, it would appear:
familiar with Harley Granville-Barker's famous essay arguing that Love's Labour's Lost could be treated as highly stylised, with the dialogue and action treated with an almost musical sense of rhythm. Branagh took this insight a step further and turned the play into a musical, going much further in his adaptation of the play than he had ever done in his Shakespeare films, and risking the alienation of both audiences and serious critics.What's more, he chose his cast "without much regard for singing or dancing ability ... the film was meant to highlight energy and enthusiasm rather than smooth competence." To quote W. S. Gilbert, who had a similarly unfortunate experience with an adaptation of Hamlet:
I called it Gretchen. The audience called it rot.
"As a result of its poor commercial performance, Miramax shelved its three-picture deal with Branagh." He didn't return to Shakespeare until As You Like It in 2006.
Cast:For such an "impossible" play, Titus Andronicus seems to have had more than its fair share of productions. Probably the most famous of all would have to be Peter Brook's immensely stylised version of 1955, with the long ribbons streaming from Vivien Leigh's sleeves to represent her severed hands. It's claimed that some members of the audience fainted at the sheer intensity of the scene.
- Eileen Atkins as Tamora
- Trevor Peacock as Titus
- Anna Calder-Marshall as Lavinia
- Tim Potter as Clown
Director Jane Howell was given a choice of all the remaining plays in the final season, and chose Titus because it "seemed impossible" and thus a challenge. Howell was interested in setting the play in a modern setting such as contemporary Northern Ireland, to explore the political resonances of the play. Unable to do this under the series' mandate, she settled on a more conventional approach. Trevor Peacock was cast first and, as he was of average height, the other actors were cast to complement his stature. Howell had the Roman populace all wear identical generic masks without mouths, so as to convey the idea that the Roman people were faceless and voiceless, as she felt the play depicted a society which "seemed like a society where everyone was faceless except for those in power." In the opening scene, as the former emperor's body is carried out, only Saturninus and Bassianus take their masks away from their faces, and they do so only to glare at one another.
All the body parts seen throughout were based upon real autopsy photographs and were authenticated by the Royal College of Surgeons. The costumes of the Goths were based on punk outfits, with Chiron and Demetrius specifically based on the band Kiss. For the scene when Chiron and Demetrius are killed, a large carcass is seen hanging nearby; this was a genuine lamb carcass purchased from a kosher butcher and smeared with Vaseline to make it gleam under the studio lighting.- Wikipedia: Titus Andronicus
Jane Howell's rather Brechtian approach to theatre was perhaps less successful here than in her Henry VI / Richard III tetralogy. But - as always - it was imaginative and interesting.
Like her versions of the earlier history plays, this one is bloody and ruthless in the extreme. Perhaps not quite so wholeheartedly so as more recent productions, though, such as this Japanese language one from the early 2000s:
"In my end is my beginning" is a phrase which Mary Queen of Scots is reported to have embroidered to while away her long years of imprisonment.
I'm sure that the symbolism of ending their epic task of filming all 37 of Shakespeare's canonical plays for posterity with a production of Titus, his first tragedy, an attempt to echo the blood-and-thunder melodramas of the 1580s, did not escape the powers-that-be at the BBC. Parts of it still seem impressive, other parts have not stood up so well, but as a whole, it's certainly an achievement for the ages.
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